Because of the high stakes, the expected winnings of buying a $2 ticket is $1.21. In other words, if you spend $2 on tickets, then you will get back $3.21 in winnings on average, for a net gain of $1.21.

Because Powerball publishes the probabilities of winning each prize, we're able to figure out the expected value of a ticket.

Slightly more than 96% of the time, a ticket is a loser, and a player loses $2.

But the remaining 4% of the time, the player enjoys a net financial gain. 2.7% of the time a player gains $2; 0.45% of the time a player gains $5; and so on and so forth. A tiny, tiny fraction of the time, a player gains half a billion dollars.

As a result, if you multiply through the probabilities you get the expected gains and losses of buying a ticket. The average gains of buying a ticket exceed the guaranteed loss of buying a ticket because of the huge jackpot, and the net expected value of playing a ticket turns out to be $1.21.

What's more, there's probably going to be a winner this time.

Here's the probability of at least one jackpot winner given the number of tickets sold:

Powerball claims that they expect to sell more than 189 million tickets before the drawing tonight. That translates to a 66% probability of at least one winner, so the odds are rather good that there will be at least one new multi-millionaire tomorrow.

The best way to determine that figure out is 1 minus the probability that there isn't a winner at all, that every single ticket sold is wrong. Since the probability that a single ticket is wrong is 175223509/175223510, that raised to the 189 millionth power is around 34 percent. There's a 34% probability that every ticket is wrong, so there's a 66% probability that at least one ticket is right.

This brings us to the conclusion that there is a two in three chance that the Powerball lottery won't get any better than it is now.